Raven Wrap-up: June 2013

A lot goes on every month at Raven. We’re constantly working to come up with new features you’ll love in your Raven account, and new resources to help you make the most of our 20+ Internet marketing tools. (Oh, and we sometimes get new office toys too. That’s what’s going on in the pic above.)

Here’s a recap of what we did in June.

What’s new in Raven

This month, we rolled out a few notable updates that came from customer requests, including:

Blog highlights: How to do stuff with Raven

At the heart of every successful thing – Internet marketing, writing, deciding what to watch in your Netflix queue – there’s some kind of a system. For link building, Raven provides that system in the form of Link Manager. While we’ve made a pretty good guess at the ways you might want to categorize your links, you may want to create your own custom labels. Did you know that you can create customizable Link Types, Website Types and Link Statuses?

When you’re building links, quality is everything. Even if we leave search signals out of the equation, it boils down to this: If you get a mention on a website, you want to make sure that website is the highest quality it can possibly be. Finding high quality, relevant websites to seek mentions and links from can be a hurdle for anyone marketing a site. Let’s look at a quick and easy process for locating quality websites using three of Raven’s best-loved tools.

We have Raven users from all continents (except Antarctica). So customers not in The States, where Raven is based, often want to know whether Raven will work as a solution for their country and language. The answer, for the most part, is: yes!

Client communication is one of the biggest challenges of SEO. With Raven’s Site Performance tool, you can answer client questions in a matter of seconds – and focus your time on doing great work, not reporting it.

Templates are typically easy to use and can be a huge time saver. Did you know that you can create template messages in Raven’s CRM to assist in your outreach efforts, work more closely with clients and more?

Let’s say you landed a new client – a car dealership that wants to ship more cars. You’re going to present a strategy for breaking into social media marketing, but first you need to measure how they’re currently doing. To get started, let’s pull their Google AdWords and Google Analytics data into Raven and start centralizing the data so we can see what’s going on.

As Raven’s Community Manager, I had the pleasure of joining Digital Always Media partner Alan K’necht, Firestarter Social Media President Michelle Stinson Ross, Cirrus ABS Director of Visibility and Social Media Kevin Mullett, and Sensei Marketing Partner Sam Fiorella for a spirited and fun discussion on social media metrics. You can watch it here:

Raven customer Adam Riemer came up with a cool use for Raven that we hadn’t even thought of: affiliate management.

Raven Tools ended up becoming a pretty cool Affiliate Management Software that helps you to manage a program. It …gives you a way to manage your day, follow up with partners, monitor them, group them, reach out to them and keep up with everything you need to do to make yourself an effective Affiliate Manager.

On Search Engine Watch, Lisa Barone about how tools like Raven can help get your CEO into social media.

With the number of CEOs participating in social projected to increase 50 percent over the next five years, it seems the days of the elusive CEO hiding in the boardroom are over. In today’s social economy, visible storytelling sells, and who better to tell your story than the person responsible for leading the charge? How do you convince your CEO to drop the hate and get on the social media soapbox?

Can the rate of real business returns on social media marketing efforts be quantified? Can we explain HOW we quantify social media activity in a way that small business owners and corporate executives can understand and appreciate? The answer is absolutely, YES. And the team at Raven Tools has provided an excellent guide defining 30 valuable social metrics that take the mystery out of reach, engagement, and even the ever elusive social conversion.